I hope things are going well with you.

Thanks for the compliment and I’m glad you liked the review.

You make a great point in that, “Those that want to learn will make the most of the course.”

Great review, strong points regarding design.

As for the on/off site aspects of web courses, I think both are viable. The internet is designed for autodidact learning. Those that want to learn will make the most of the course.

As for your suggestions, right-on. It looks like the site was designed by programmers. They take ‘function’ over form, every time. There is no visual hierarchy at all.

really nice review.

I’m in Ireland at the minute so my time is limited. I’ll be following the discussion at Johno’s site.

The organisation where I work has a fluid website, and I hate it – it’s really poorly designed. But as it’s an educational website I think it had to use a fluid design in order to meet it’s accessibility requirements.

I saw that site before when reading your post. It’s nicely done, but I’m still not convinced. I get your point about working on a smaller screen, but couldn’t you just cycle through the windows? I’m not saying you should; I’m just thinking of how one might justify fluid designs.

I’m open for conversion, but you’ll have a better chance tomorrow (I’m terribly intransigent today!).

However, this is an interesting discussion. And a big thumbs-up to open-mindedness, Vivien :D

I personally do often, if not always resize the browsers, I don’t work with multiple screens and I often need to fit two application windows side by side. In such cases it’s more convenient to deal with fluid/liquid sites.

On a big screen I never maximize the browser so I never end up reading looong lines of text. Plus, there are different ways of creating a liquid website, and that’s what I’ve tried to show in my collection.

Did you see http://uwmike.com ? – it has lots of white space and it is liquid.

I’m not trying to convert you here, johno. Just talking out loud. I personally like having an open mind in design, and in life in general.

And I don’t really understand the whole fluid layout thing. Why? I’m happy to read my books without stretching the paper, my newspapers and magazines too. I never intentionally cater for those users with 800*600 res screens, and those with giant-size displays won’t want to read a line of copy that’s 2850px wide; so I just don’t get the need for the fluid layout. And I just don’t care that the content resizes when I resize my browser window – I never resize it. I work on a workstation with 3 screens and on my laptop, and I’m happy to have the content author/designer present me with a fixed width layout. And if for some strange reason I resize my window to 200px wide, then I can’t really complain when I can’t see the other 600px.

I think I’m in one of my critical moods today. Please no-one take offense :)

And one more thing: I like to see some white space. It comforts me, helps me get my bearings. The white space helps me find the content. Until David’s asking me to name a fluid layout that I like, I was a fluid-agnostic; now I’m fluid-atheist.

I must get on and write my own post! I must unsubscribe your feed or I’ll never get it written ;)

Some of the sites in the collection were chosen to show different approaches in laying out the design for a liquid site.

Lisa’s and GNV sites are two of my favourites too.

I took a look through them. Some nice examples, some I’m not so fussed about. Good of you to piece that together though.

As I said over on your site, I’m a fan of Lisa Sabin-Wilson and I enjoy the Italian GNV site. They do some sterling work.